MuniWireless

Sascha Meinrath has posted a thoughtful piece about what makes a municipal wireless network successful. In this post, he mentions that several people take issue with the semantics itself: muni wireless, municipal wireless. That’s because a lot of people associate it either with (a) a network run by the government funded by the government or (b) a network run by a private company funded entirely by a private company (e.g. the EarthLink model). But that’s beside the point. Sascha does not care what it’s called because frankly, no one does. What people care about is that it works: there’s coverage where you expect there to be coverage and there’s enough bandwidth for you to do meaningful work. That’s what I care about.

Indeed, what I got from Sascha’s piece is that like everything else “online” today, a wireless network gives people what they want only if it plays nice with other wireless networks — those can be WiMAX, 3G, whatever. People don’t care what kind of wireless it is — they just want to get access to their applications on their portable devices.

Read more on Sascha’s blog.